Opinionated writing from the Spark I/O practice. What we're seeing in the field, what we'd do differently, and the arguments we're willing to make in public. New essays every other week.
Every AI engagement starts the same way. A pilot. Six weeks. One team. "Let's prove it works." Six months later, the pilot is a ghost — technically successful, organizationally stuck. We've seen it enough to name the pattern, and the fix isn't more models or better prompts. It's the unglamorous work of data access and change management. Here's what we do instead.
Manuel Villafañe · Founder → Read the essayTen+ years inside the systems that run real companies. Senior Director of Business Systems & Digital Transformation at KnowBe4 — built and led a ~56-person org across Salesforce DevOps, admins, developers, RevOps, integrations, and AI engineering. Before that, Solution Architect at Coastal Cloud running the Experience Cloud Center of Excellence, and consulting at Accenture on DoD logistics.
Computer Engineer (Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico). Five Salesforce certifications. Bilingual by birth, opinionated by trade. Writes every Field Note personally — no ghostwriters, no LLM-padded thinkpieces. If you disagree, the reply-to is real.